Tips for Editing Blog Content

After hours of writing content comes another hour of editing and proofreading. You can find a lot of copywriting tips and inspirations from the MicroCreatives blog; now let us give you tips we’ve gathered from Copyblogger on proofreading and editing blog content.

Editing content is not just simply proofreading and watching out for spelling and grammar errors that you will correct. It’s also improving the quality and making sure that it is consistent with the tone and approach of the whole website, and the business or brand if you’re editing blog content for a company.

Commit to Quality

When you are not the only one writing content for the blog, it becomes essential for the blog to have an editor-in-chief who will take ownership of the blog and assure consistency. With this goal in mind, you can demonstrate your commitment to quality through thoughtful presentation. The content should always keep the readers’ best interest in mind.

Build Momentum

Just like everything in life, in order to reach our goals, a good preparation is necessary. In this case, after writing our content, we don’t just plunge into editing it straight ahead.

Probably you’ve done things to prepare yourself to write. Same thing goes when editing; we need to condition ourselves before starting proofreading and deciding the direction we want the content to take.

Here are some activities to help build up momentum for editing:

Get inspired: Reading articles, essays, and other writings by your favorite writers can help refresh your mind and can influence your attitude in editing content.

Listen to music: Focusing on the structure of the lyrics of a song made by your favorite artists is a good start in building up your mood for editing. Studies have shown that people listening to music at work improve productivity, attention to detail, and reduce mistakes.

Write other things: Writing other things different from what you’re about to edit could be a refresher for the brain. After doing so, when you get back to editing your previous content, you’ll have a fresh mind and be critical in examining your content.

Create Connections

The main purpose writing content for business is to fulfill both you and your readers’ needs. So considering their desires and hopes is an essential part of how you present your work.

Put yourself in the shoes of your readers, think of what will engage them and what will be the holding factor for them to read your content from start to finish.

Making your content much easier to understand and straight to the point is one of the objectives of editing. By bringing out the best out of your content and highlighting them is a much more reasonable thought for editing than just correcting grammar and adjusting texts.

Infuse Voice and Personality

We all know that inspiration can come from everywhere. And being inspired by things that don’t seem to be relevant to what you’re writing can be a good thing.

Editing opens an opportunity for you to put your creative input to your content. Presenting the information is easy and common. Add personality to your content; immerse things that are unusual or things that will surprise and hook the readers. Give it a tone that will not only make it stand out but also to connect with your readers not only to make them read it but also to take everything you’ve written by heart.

Ask Yourself

This part especially applies when you are editing your own work. Taking a break after writing is not unusual and is indeed indispensable to clear your mind before going back to your content to review it objectively. And while you’re on a break, take this as an opportunity to ask yourself questions that can help you objectively look at and edit your work.

Examples of questions you can ask yourself are:

Will readers get hooked with this headline and introduction?

Who will benefit from this content?

What makes this content special?

Can I simplify this point?

Have I put enough value?

The vital factor in questioning your work is to think and put ourselves in the shoes and the world of our readers.

Add Flair

Adding spark to your content can be a great holding factor. I’m not saying that having plain, informative content is bad, but wouldn’t it be more interesting to present it in a fun and creative way?

Repetitiveness could be drab and dreary for readers. Your content should contain things that are unusual and unpredictable to ignite intrigue to the readers. This can be done in the editing process through your play of words.

Remember that you’re an artist. Play with words to present your ideas in your unique voice. You don’t have to use a lot of big words and metaphors to sound deep and hip as this can alienate some readers. While being creative with your content, remember to use wordplay sparingly.

Simplify

Often times, writers get a little wordy in producing content. One of the reasons why we edit is to achieve precision.

Without having to render an incomplete content, we should cut out the things that won’t benefit our readers. We should always aim to be on point of what we want to say. And about those cut parts, save them for your future projects. Maybe they’ll fit in there much better than to what you are doing now.

Doing the steps above allows for thorough screening of your content as it will provide different views of your work.

Create a Flawless Reading Experience

Ultimately, we write for the readers, considering how they will perceive our work. One thing that could spoil the reading experience of our audience is when typos aren’t corrected and worse if the errors had been published.

The readers can still get what you really want to say after two or three times of reading. But still, that is too much to ask from them. We want the experience they’ll be having with our content to be as pleasurable and valuable as possible.

To assist you, websites like Grammarly can ease the trouble for you. It can scan every grammatical and punctuation mistakes you might commit that are sometimes easy to miss.

Let’s keep in mind that proofreading is not simply reading. It involves a slow process of scrutinized scanning of every word, sentence, and punctuation and making sure that everything is in order and makes sense.

Maintain Accuracy

Fact checking everything, even the smallest information on your content, will do great things for your readers and your credibility as a writer. As a writer, we give information to our readers and it is important to invest time in making sure that everything presented in our content is true and accurate.

Giving your readers false information is much worse than having a misspelled word or wrongly punctuated sentence.

We should build our content under the foundation of truth and respect, not only for our readers but also for the people involved in it. Clients and personalities we quote are some of the people involved in our writing process. Having their names and brands correctly indicated in our content will benefit them and the writer as well.

OPPORTUNITY VS. RECTIFICATION

Editing should be viewed as a chance to enhance, more than just correcting errors. Whether your content reflects a certain brand or a person, what we set out to our audience will influence them and will directly represent who we are.

These modern editing tips will help you minimize the thought of editing and proofreading as a hard drudgery, and think of it as more of a fun self-discovery of who your readers are and who you could be as a writer.

If you’re still having trouble regarding anything that involves creativity, MicroCreatives has your back. We have a pool of talented web developers, designers, and copywriters that are sure to address every creative dilemma you have.